A quick note to help close out 2008.  Standards for time have been around since at least the establishment of time zones in the 19th century, and are another form of policy.  In this case the International Bureau of Weights and Measures is responsible for the Universal Time Scale (H/T Scientific American’s 60-Second Science blog).  I bring this up primarily to note the addition of a leap second later today, just before midnight Universal Time (or just before 5 p.m. Mountain Standard Time).  Learn more from the official U.S. Naval Observatory press release.

Well, it all depends on what “stopped” means.

I’ve been asked to comment on the silly debate over whether or not global warming has “stopped.” Like so much in the climate debate, the answer to this question depends upon what you want it to be, your political views, and what is meant by the word “stop.” So here are two incompatible perspectives.

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Mark Brown, currently at Bielefeld University and a scholar I have a lot of respect for, has a review of The Honest Broker out in Minerva (here in PDF). In the review Brown’s discussion of science and democracy goes well beyond the discussion in THB, and makes for a very useful companion to the book. He writes:

. . . for anyone interested in a policy-oriented perspective on science advice, The Honest Broker offers an accessible and stimulating guide to improving the role of science advisors in politics and policymaking.

Brown provides a very nice summary of one part of the book, clearly getting the point that advocacy is not to be frowned upon, it is stealth advocacy that should be of concern:

By seeking to broaden scientists’ perception of the possible political roles they might adopt, Pielke himself plays the role of Honest Broker. He declines to advocate any one of his four models as an ideal appropriate to all contexts. He even defends the role usually most frowned upon, the Issue Advocate, saying that scientists should engage in issue advocacy ‘‘in cases where they feel strongly enough’’ (p. 94). But Pielke insists that if scientists advocate particular policies, they should do so openly and with reference to political values, rather than pretending that their preferred policies follow directly from their scientific claims. Such dissembling amounts to Stealth Issue Advocacy, which ultimately politicizes science advice and undermines the public credibility of science.

Pielke’s analysis of Stealth Issue Advocacy and its consequences is perhaps the book’s most important contribution.

Brown has an excellent paper out on the notion of “balance” on federal advisory committees that you can see here.

About a dozen people have sent me a link to an article in today’s WSJ, so I’d better blog on it. The article looks at Dell Computers’ claim to be “carbon neutral” finding it to be a somewhat creative use of the phrase. From the article:

The amount of emissions Dell has committed to neutralize is known in the environmental industry as the company’s “carbon footprint.” But there is no universally accepted standard for what a footprint should include, and so every company calculates its differently. Dell counts the emissions produced by its boilers and company-owned cars, its buildings’ electricity use, and its employees’ business air travel.

In fact, that’s only a small fraction of all the emissions associated with Dell. The footprint doesn’t include the oil used by Dell’s suppliers to make its computer parts, the diesel and jet fuel used to ship those computers around the world, or the coal-fired electricity used to run them.

Dell’s announcement that it had achieved carbon neutrality didn’t go into these details. But in an interview, Dell officials estimate that the emissions produced by its suppliers and consumers each amount to about 10 times the footprint Dell has defined for itself. That means the company is only neutralizing about 5% of the greenhouse gases that go into the making and use of its products.

Moreover, while Dell is improving its energy efficiency, it is claiming carbon neutrality mostly by purchasing environmental “credits.” These are financial instruments that bankroll environmental improvements made by others, such as running wind turbines or planting forests. Dell reasons that these credits cancel out the bulk of its carbon footprint.

Yet some of those improvements would have occurred whether or not Dell invested in them, according to some of the companies involved. That suggests Dell isn’t ridding the atmosphere of as much pollution as it claims.

Dell says it’s trying to set an example by reducing its environmental impact as responsibly and aggressively as it can.

“There are skeptics of carbon neutrality who will say, ‘That’s kind of bogus,’” says Dane Parker, Dell’s director of environment, health and safety.

There’s a report from Wired.com’s Epicenter blog reflecting a failure to follow basic common sense for effective policy.  Several groups are advocating for even more money for broadband deployment than the Obama administration intends to have in its economic stimulus plan.  Apparently the wrinkle here is that there is very little, if any, public information on how many currently have broadband, and how much they pay for it.  There are other related questions that are hard to answer – unless you are one of the companies providing the service.  But that information is also not publicly available.  If you read the blog entry, you’ll find that reporting requirements were recently reduced, making it harder to effectively judge how to invest that broadband money.  This is the same data problem we currently have with TARP funds, except in that case, there’s no information (or requirements to produce it) on how that money is being spent.  Here we don’t have the information needed to effectively invest money.  Either way, the chances for effective policy drop precipitously.

Munich Re, one of the largest global reinsurance companies, has often skirted near the line of scientific credibility when discussing disaster losses and climate change. This week Munich Re stepped way over that line when it uses the issue of human-caused climate change to suggest higher reinsurance rates and support for a global climate treaty.

In a press release Munich Re observes of 2008:

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Doesn’t mean they’ll be a good scientific appointment.

The best (or worst, depending on how you frame this) example remains career scientist and current EPA head Stephen Johnson.  For evidence, take a gander at this recent profile in the Philadelphia Inquirer (H/T: Reality Base).  Saying anything more might just be piling on.

Unfortunately, the harder sell is the inverse: that just because someone isn’t a scientist doesn’t mean they’d be a bad scientific appointee.

As co-chair of the National Commission on Energy Policy, John Holdren (President-elect Obama’s choice for science advisor) testified before Congress in 2005 (PDF) in support of “clean coal” technologies and putting an initial price on carbon of $7/ton while expanding the use of coal for electricity generation.. These views would appear to place Holdren strongly at odds with the more vocal wing of the climate apocolyptosphere which often calls for a much higher price on carbon and the bulldozing of coal plants. Both ideas may offer some cathartic relief to those espousing them but in reality are politically impossible. Holdren thus displays far more political realism than some of his supporters, setting the stage for some dashed expectations.

It will be interesting to see what views Holdren (and the rest of the climate/energy team) ultimately present, and how these views are received. My guess is that the honeymoon won’t last long.

While scientists and their advocates in the U.S. are hoping the new administration will fully fund the COMPETES Act and double the research budgets of the DOE Office of Science, the National Science Foundation, and the National Institute of Standards and Technology, South Korea aims to do more.  According to a post on the Science magazine science policy blog, South Korea aims to become one of the top seven R&D countries in the world.  They currently consider themselve number 12, spending 3.23% of GDP on R&D in 2006 (the U.S. spends a smaller percentage of its GDP), and 25.6% of their research budget on basic and fundamental research.  They plan to boost the GDP percentage to 5% and the share of research budget on basic and fundamental research to 50%.

I’m not as convinced as the blog poster that the South Korean plan will make the country more of a science powerhouse and not just a tech giant, since the boosts in even basic and fundamental research planned will probably be focused heavily on the seven tech areas targeted by the country.  I also have my doubts that government tax incentives will really persuade the country’s businesses to contribute three-quarters of all R&D spending (however, that might be my American bias).  Even if they do, current trends in industrial R&D suggest that a very small r and an enormous D in that figure.  It isn’t clear if that will allow for the enormous boosts in research grants that are part of the plan.  All said, it’s still nice to see a government trying an aggressive plan rather than passing a bill with little funding to support it.

An Emory University Researcher has been sanctioned by the school for, among other things, failing to report about $800,000 in speaking fees from GlaxoSmithKline.  As Science Magazine’s science policy blog reports, psychiatrist Charles Nemeroff has been banned from accepting industry money at certain speaking engagements, and not to seek any National Insitutes of Health funding for 2 years.  You can get the complete details from the university’s report.

I don’t have much patience for research misconduct, and only a little bit more for the appearance of conflicts of interest.  If Nemeroff served jail time I’d think it well deserved.  Scientific communities could do a lot better to make things more transparent and to diminish the appearance of conflicts of interest.  Most of the reported cases come from biomedicine, but I think that’s more likely a result of how easy it is to find the conflicts (apparent or not), than any particular quality of the discipline.  I am not calling for an end to industry sponsored research – in part because they aren’t the only sources of conflicts.  I do think research support needs to be more explicity accounted for.  Simple acknowledgements of support in the back of research articles seem inadequate in expressing the relationships in play.

I do not want to immediately distrust a researcher because of the area of study they are in, but it’s getting harder and harder not to.  If Emory saw fit to impose the sanctions they did while also claiming that Nemeroff didn’t taint his research or patient care, I suspect the university sees where I’m coming from.